A post on the Roberts Space Industries Website announces that Star Citizen has attracted more than $4 million in funding from fans eager for a new space combat game from the creator of Wing Commander. The post outlines additional stretch goals beyond that point, and a follow-up announces another system is unlocked, and says they now have stretch goals all the way to the $5 million mark. Finally, the latest update announces that having passed $4.2 million, they have climbed to the top of the crowd-sourcing mountain:

$4.2 million! Which means that Star Citizen is now the highest crowd-funded game project ever! You’ve earned this star system, and a lot more! Let’s go for $4.5! By the way: you guys are now unlocking systems faster than our artists can finish them… we promise we’ll add the missing concepts in the near future.

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Wildone wrote on Nov 17, 2012, 14:14:FU the industry that ignored space sims..obviously there was more than a niche market out there. FU.

Not so fast...

Don't mean to rain on the parade, quite the contrary as I am pretty enthusiastic about Star Citizen myself and backed the project, but I think we need to acknowledge that in spite of the seemingly overwhelming success of this fund-raiser, there are still "only" a little over 60K people who were willing to pledge for this space sim so far.60K people is nothing. Even 2x 60K is still nothing. Numbers like that mean that we are firmly and deeply in "niche market" territory.

We should not be totally blinded by the success of this campaign. Looking at the whole picture there is plenty of reason for concern. Space sims are a niche (how many people do you know who own a flight controller of some sort?) and will continue to be an endangered species with a serious risk of extinction if CR fails to deliver... which, btw, isn't that unlikely at all. Reminiscing the Origin and Digital Anvil days, I remember hefty delays and cut features and if you check out CR's bio (on Wikipedia) you can see he definitely has a bit of a hit & miss track record.He's not the messiah and this ain't the Second Coming.

60k backers without a finished product and a large varying outline is quite a statement I'd say. These backers aren't indicative of total purchases in any way considering how basic the planning stage is at this point. What other game or game company which has a release date of 2 years away would receive this many backer's trust especially with a new IP? This is a pretty large shift against the iron fisting of publishers.